Zim Zam Zoom: TrackMania Turbo Released

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Oh what a feeling! When we’re driving on the ceiling. They’re special things, the TrackMania games, combining simple time trial millisecond-shaving checkpoint zoomcars with ludicrous tracks crammed full of loops, jumps, corkscrews, and bright colours – with a great editor for players to make their own. The fun continues today with the release of TrackMania Turbo [official site], out now. It’s due to have a demo, and Ubi say it’s already out, but it doesn’t seem to be here just yet. Maybe later tonight?

TrackMania, to be clear, is about ghost cars. While other cars will appear on the track with you, you can’t collide with each other – you’re purely racing the track. Which I like, especially as it means servers can be real busy with dozens of cars whizzing around.

While the last TrackMania, TM2 (which of course wasn’t the second TrackMania – video game naming!), split its different environments and car types into separate games, Turbo has four all in one package. But I do see some folks complaining about Turbo removing player-hosted dedicated servers, which are certainly a loss. Beyond that, I haven’t had the chance to play yet so I can’t say much about Turbo.

TrackMania Turbo is £29.99/$39.99/€39.99 on Steam and Ubi’s store and whatnot. Uplay required, obvs. If you’re reading this a while after I posted this, hey, check the ‘free games’ section of the Uplay client. Ubi’s store page say a demo is there, though it isn’t yet. Someone from Nadeo said earlier today that it should arrive “soon.”

25 Comments

While the core game is every bit of fun I hoped it would be Turbo as a PC game is sorely lacking in many ways, no gfx config options to speak of, the only aa option is a terrible implementation of fxaa and there have been several bugs with fullscreen mode (it won’t set the res you want it to be, I ended up using borderless mode) and audio (quality is low for me and the countdown people at the start of a run use a different random language each time).

What makes uPlay aesthetically offensive? The new client looks quite solid to me, certainly better than the atrociously outdated Steam GUI. My complaint is with not being able to keep all of my games in one place but as far as problems with uPlay, the look of the client is one of the last things I’d complain about. Their store is a disaster area, though, no idea how that level of design fail got out into the wild.

At least Steam is functional, Uplay isn’t. There isn’t even a way to display just *installed* games by default instead of all of your games by default. It feels like it’s been stuck in a barely functional beta for years now.

The feeling is mutual, unless you can tell me where in the settings I can find this. I haven’t found it a year ago, I haven’t found it two weeks ago when I bought The Division, and I haven’t found it just now.

Yeah, I know about that button. What I meant above is that the *default* view, when you launch Uplay, always takes you to the complete list of games, demos, etc., sorted alphabetically, at first. You can’t sort them by “last played”, you can’t launch with Uplay just showing installed games, etc.

My issue with Uplay or Origin is that they aren’t inclusive. The actual clients themselves are OK, not great. What bothers me is having to have 5 different programs all doing the same thing on my computer.

If EA or Ubisoft wanted to make a direct competitor to Steam, one that sells all games, not just their own, that would be fine. Or if they offered their own launchers as an option but allowed you to use Steam otherwise and bypass them…cool. What bugs the shit out of me is that they refuse to make their launcher an open platform while also forcing you to use it if you want to play their games, turning their launcher into what feels like junkware. A pointless piece of crap I don’t want, that I’m forced to launch and log into every time I want to play own of their games.

They saw Steam doing so well for Valve and then thought, hey, if Valve can do it so can we, but in true EA/Ubi style, entirely missed what it was about Steam that people liked…the fact that it’s centralised place to buy and organise your PC games. Then in their attempt to cash in on what they saw as a money making scheme, they made Steam, the thing they were trying to emulate worse by removing their games from it.

The whole thing is just so anti-consumer. If what the publishers wanted was to provide the best experience for their customers they would have observed Steams success born off of the back of how convenient it was and thought “How can we make something even more convenient”…instead they thought “How can we make Steam less convenient”

I don’t understand why we don’t have like buttons and notifications for when someone has interacted with one of your comments. I wanted to like your comment but instead I am spending 1000% longer writing this message….thus discouraging me from even going into the comments section next time. I would waste so much time on this site if the comments were more interactive like Disqus or Kinja.

Actually they don’t. From what I’ve seen, people bluster and complain about Uplay (which to be honest these days, is pretty painless, often gives better download speeds than Steam or Origin) but it’s the game that matters most.

You’ll see a hundreds comments that read like “Shame this uses Uplay, so I won’t play it” but people that post on sites like this are a minority group of PC Gamers and the people that say these things are a minority group within that minority group. The silent masses only care about the game and don’t really care about that program that automatically logs into their account and launches the game when they click on it.

Uplay gets a lot of misguided criticism like “The Division servers are down so **** Uplay”. That is exactly like blaming Steam because the Rocketleague servers are down. Nobody would even think to blame Steam though, it’s just not that popular… yet. The games on Uplay, even if they are all developed and published by Ubisoft have their own servers to run on. Rainbow Six: Siege might be completely unaffected by the Division downtime for example and the downtime has nothing to do with “Uplay”.

Trackmania United Forever is the old game with everything included.
Trackmania Nations Forever is a free version of the old game, with probably limited game types. It is the old version of what became…
Trackmania 2 Stadium. It has F1 style cars and crazy stadium tracks.
Trackmania 2 Canyon has a different feel to the cars, and drifting is an important part of the driving style. This is the one that I like the most (haven’t played Turbo).
Trackmania 2 Valley is more of a rally version of the previous two. There are more dirt tracks, and drifting is usually a bad idea.
Trackmania Turbo is the new one, and probably includes all the three above and more.

Been having a blast with this today, just played the single player so far. The cars are magnificent to drive and each has a certain unique knack to them. Yeah there’s crossover with this and TM2 but I’m totally celebrating the fact they’ve made a game with proper menus and satisfying ui animations and SFX. The tracks look better than ever, it’s the first TM with a strong sense of style to it. Fun dynamic music… It’s a box full of fun so far.

Finding it amusing people complaining about uplay (which might as well be invisible if playing through Steam) after putting up with the absolute mess of the Mania Planet launcher with TM2.

It really is brilliant that they’ve finally gotten someone in who can make menus, isn’t it? I tried to get TM2 going as a party game several times, but it was just -awful- to play in local multiplayer because of the menus being obtuse at best when using a controller.

So far I’ve been really impressed with the style and UI of this one, plus the ability to randomly generate tracks for local multiplayer modes is a great idea!